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MILLER: Obama’s big gun slip

President Obama is in a fix over firearms. He needs to win undecided voters in the swing states to be re-elected, but these areas are largely pro-gun. So after years of trying to dodge the issue, Mr. Obama let it slip in Tuesday’s presidential debate that he’d push a gun ban in a second term. It’s a revelation that could sway the election.

In the town-hall event at Hofstra University, “undecided” voter Nina Gonzalez asked the president what he’d done to limit the availability of assault weapons. Mr. Obama feigned support for the Second Amendment before calling for regulation of inexpensive handguns, automatic weapons and resurrecting the so-called assault-weapons ban.

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Mitt Romney countered that, “I’m not in favor of new pieces of legislation on guns and taking guns away or making certain guns illegal.”

The president’s plan to revive the Clinton-era gun law won’t make America safer.

“He wants to reinstate and expand on a ban that was in place for 10 years which, by all evidence, did nothing to reduce crime,” Larry Keane, general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, told The Washington Times. “In the eight years since the ban sunsetted, gun ownership has gone up, so more firearms are in civilian possession than ever before in the United States. At the same time, crime is at its lowest level since the early 1960s and so are accidents.”

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About the Author

Emily Miller is senior editor of opinion for The Washington Times. She is the author of “Emily Gets Her Gun … But Obama Wants to Take Yours” (Regnery 2013). Miller won the 2012 Clark Mollenhoff Award for Investigative Reporting from the Institute on Political Journalism.